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الله اكبر ، الله اكبر , الله اكبر لا إله الا الله الله اكبر ، الله كبر ولله الحمد الله اكبر كبيرا ، والحمدلله كثيرا وسبحان الله وبحمده بكرة واصيلا لا إله الله ، والله اكبر

You Owe It To Yourself To Be Great by Listen

This audio is for people that have no motivation to study.. I know a lot of people get bombarded with material they need to study and get further educated. I know it can be hard to keep up with but it's worth it in the end. I made this audio to give you that motivation to study and keep working towards those goals you want to achieve.

Amelia Earhart was born in 1897, in Kansas, USA. Even as a child she didn't behave in a conventionally 'feminine' way. She climbed trees and hunted rats with her rifle - but she wasn't particularly interested in flying. She saw her first plane when she was 10, and wasn't impressed at all. But she was very interested in newspaper reports about women who were successful in male-dominated professions, such as engineering, law and management. She cut them out and kept them.

Cinema Etiquette by Listen

At 9.25am on Friday 21 October 1966, the police officer on duty at Merthyr Tydfyl police station in South Wales answered a telephone call. “I have been asked to inform you that there has been a landslide”, said the caller. “The tip has come down on the school.” To understand this story, you need to know that South Wales used to be a very important coalmining area. The mines in South Wales produced steam coal, which was used to fire boilers in ships and factories, and anthracite, which is a very high quality coal used for heating homes and other buildings. In the early part of the last century, there were 620 collieries (coal mines) in South Wales, employing nearly a quarter of a million people. Now, when coal is brought out of the ground it is mixed with rock and dirt and coal which is too fine to be used. This is called colliery waste, and it was normal for the colliery waste to be dumped in a huge heap – a spoil heap or tip – near to the mine. In the coal mining valleys of South Wales, these tips were often built on the sides of the valleys. One such tip was on the hillside overlooking the village of Aberfan. October 1966 was a very wet month. The rain soaked into the spoil heap above Aberfan until it was full of water. The tip began to move. It slid down the hill and into the village. It swept over houses and the primary school. In the school, lessons had just begun. It was the last school day before the half-term holiday. Altogether, 143 people died in the Aberfan disaster, including 119 children – that is, over half of the children at the school. I can remember the newspaper reports the next morning, and how horrified everyone was by what had happened. One picture was in all the papers – a picture of a policeman carrying a small girl from the wreckage of the school. I have put it on the podcast website. The photographer who took the picture was only 18 years old at the time. There was a formal enquiry to find out why the disaster had happened. It emerged that junior officials in the National Coal Board had been worried by the condition of the Aberfan spoil heap, but their bosses had done nothing. Many people were shocked that no-one was prosecuted, or even lost their job, because of the Aberfan disaster. If you visit the area today, you will see little sign of the coal industry. There is only one working deep mine left in South Wales. Many of the places where the old collieries used to be are now supermarkets or new housing estates. The colliery tips have been levelled. But the people have not forgotten what happened that day 40 years ago.

In this podcast, we meet the expression “the trouble is that…” (which means “the problem is that….”). We also discover several different ways of getting things wrong – upside down, back to front and inside out. Kevin and Joanne sat on their sofa and looked around their flat. It was a mess. There were books and clothes and bits of hi-fi equipment all over the floor. “The trouble is,” said Joanne, “that you never put things away.” “No, the trouble is that we have nowhere to put things, ” said Kevin. And Kevin was right. They needed more cupboards or shelves to put things on. So they went to IKEA. IKEA is a huge home-furnishing store. You can find IKEA stores in many big cities in Britain, and most European countries and nowdays in lots of places outside Europe. Nearly all English people say “eye-key-a”. But I know that in Sweden people say “ee-kay-a”, and since IKEA is a Swedish company, that is the way I pronounce their name. Actually, IKEA is very Swedish. All their ranges of furniture have Swedish names, and some of these sound funny (or even rude) in English. And the cafe at IKEA serves Swedish dishes like herring and Swedish meat-balls. IKEA furniture is “flat-pack” furniture. That means that you buy it in a pack containing all the parts you need, and when you get it home you assemble it yourself. And sometimes you find that not all the pieces are there and you have to go back to the store to get the missing bits. But to return to our story. Kevin and Joanne walked around the huge store for about an hour, and found what they needed – a cupboard and some bookshelves. The fun started when they got it all home and started to assemble it. Kevin set to work. Joanne wisely went to sit in the kitchen. About two hours later, Kevin said, “It’s finished.” “Mmm,” said Joanne, looking at the cupboard and the bookshelf. “The trouble is that this bit is back to front. And you have put the doors on upside down.” So Kevin had to dismantle the furniture and start again. He cut his finger, and hit his thumb with a hammer. Shortly before midnight, it was finished. Joanne brought him a cup of tea and admired his work. “It is perfect now,” said Kevin. “Nothing back to front. Nothing upside down.” “No,” said Joanne, “but Kevin – your jumper – look, it’s inside out!”

Have we forgotten how to fix our gadgets? A visit to a 'Restart party' might help you.

Today we are going to visit St Kilda. St Kilda is a small group of islands in the north Atlantic, far to the west of Scotland. It is the home of tens of thousands of sea birds. In fact, St Kilda is one of the most important places for sea birds anywhere in the world. And for thousands of years, people lived on St Kilda, but they do not live there any more, as I will explain. The traditional way of life on St Kilda was simple and hard. The people kept sheep and grew a few crops like barley. They hunted sea-birds for food. They did some fishing, but the sea around St Kilda is often very bad and fishing was dangerous. The people of St Kilda had little contact with the outside world. Once a year the representative of the landlord visited the island to collect rents. If the islanders needed help, they would light a big fire on the top of the main island, and hope that a passing ship would see it. Sometimes, they wrote messages and put the message inside a piece of wood. They threw the wood into the sea, and several weeks later someone walking on the shore in Scotland might find it. Some big changes happened in the 19th century. A school opened on the island, where the children learned Gaelic (which was their own language), and English (which was a foreign language for them) and arithmetic. Small numbers of tourists started to visit the islands during the summer. The tourist boats brought things which the islanders needed, and the islanders made simple souvenirs to sell to the tourists. Some of the islanders left the islands, to go to Australia, and later another group emigrated to Canada. The number of people on St Kilda had never been more than about 180. By the end of the 19th century, the number had fallen to less than 100. During the First World War, the British Navy had a wireless station on St Kilda, and on one exciting day a German submarine arrived and shelled the island. No-one was killed, but the Navy’s wireless station was destroyed. The Navy base on St Kilda made communication with the outside world easy, and Navy ships were able to bring supplies to the island. But when the war ended, the Navy base closed and life for the people of St Kilda became hard again. There were shortages of food in some years, and there was no way to get seriously ill people to hospital. By 1930, there were only 36 people left on St Kilda. They all signed a letter to the government saying that they wanted to leave before the winter storms made it impossible for a ship to reach St Kilda. And on 29 August 1930, they all left and went to mainland Scotland, and their houses, and the tiny church and school were empty. Today, the National Trust for Scotland owns St Kilda. During the summer, a warden and volunteers carry out conservation work on the old houses. You can visit St Kilda during the summer by boat from Scotland. The trip takes 14 hours, or longer in bad weather, and sometimes the boat cannot reach St Kilda at all. When you get there you will find no cafes or restaurants, no cars or tourist coaches, no public toilets or souvenir shops, just the ruins of the houses where the St Kilda people used to live, and sheep, and thousands and thousands of sea birds. The islands of St Kilda are still the islands on the edge of the world.

Would you want your phone, glasses, camera and computer all in one device. That you wear on your face? Finn and Neil talk about 'wearable tech'.

Do you enjoy the sound of singing birds? Find out what kind of effect it could have on you.

Would you buy a coffee for someone in need? Jan and Neil talk about the popular idea of suspended coffee.

Are you planning a visit to England? Are you thinking to yourself, “What shall we do in England? Are there any really special places that we must go to when we are there?” You are? Good, then this podcast is for you.

Today we visit Scotland, to find out what a Scottish schoolgirl thinks of her school meals. And because the European Cup Football matches have reached an interesting stage, and poor old England have been knocked out by Italy, this might be a good time to learn a new football expression. Martha Payne is 9 years old. She lives in a small community in Scotland called Lochgilphead. Like many British schoolchildren, Martha has a meal at school in the middle of the day. In English, we often call these meals “school dinners”. Everyone remembers the school dinners at their school – perhaps they loved their school dinners, or they hated them, or they remember funny things about them. At my school, way back in the 1950s, we sometimes got bilberry tart and custard for dessert. I remember that the bilberries made our tongues blue. We used to go around sticking our blue tongues out at each other. Martha is interested in the food at her school. She is interested in how good it tastes, and how healthy it is, and whether it contains any hairs! A few months ago, she started to write a blog about her school dinners. She took her camera into school, to photograph her school dinner, and then she posted the picture in her blog and told us what she thought about the food. Most days, she thought the food was OK, and on some days she thought it was really good. Children in other schools, and in other countries, started to read Martha’s blog. Some of them left comments to say what they thought about Martha’s school dinners. And some sent Martha pictures of their own school dinners, and Martha published these on her blog. Then Martha started to use her blog to raise money for a charity called Mary’s Meals, which provides school meals for children in poor communities in developing countries. And at this point, the bureaucrats who run the education system in the part of Scotland where Martha lives became aware of her blog. And they did not like it. They did not want publicity about the food in their schools. Perhaps they were afraid that people would start to criticise their school dinners and say that they were unhealthy. They decided that Martha’s blog had to stop. Martha’s headteacher told Martha the bad news, and Martha was sad and wrote a final blog post to say goodbye to her many readers. At this point, we will make a little diversion to talk about football. In football, you try to kick the ball into the other team’s goal. It is a big mistake to kick the ball into your own goal. Of course, sometimes, by accident, footballers do put the ball into their own goal. When this happens, we call it an “own goal”. We can use this expression outside football as well. Imagine that you do something, and it goes spectacularly wrong. It has completely the opposite effect of what you intended. You hoped that it would make things better, but actually it makes things a lot worse. We call that an “own goal”. Well, the bureaucrats who decided that Martha had to stop her blog did not want people talking about the school dinners in their schools. But you can imagine what actually happened. The newspapers, the radio and the television all carried stories about Martha’s blog. People wrote about it in Facebook, and sent tweets about it in Twitter. This was not at all what the bureaucrats wanted. Banning Martha’s blog was an “own goal”. A day later, after everyone had told them what idiots they were, they decided that – after all, and now they had thought about it a bit more – Martha could continue writing her blog about her school dinners, and taking pictures of them. You can find Martha’s blog at http://neverseconds.blogspot.co.uk. You could tell her about the meals in your school if you like, and contribute to Mary’s Meals to help provide meals for school children in poor communities throughout the world. I like stories with a happy ending. Don’t you?

Claire Williams is 20 years old. She is a student and lives at home with her parents in a town called Whitehaven. Her bedroom is a mess. Or at least it was a mess. Time and again, her parents asked her please to tidy it, but somehow she never managed to do it. Then her father, Steve Williams, had a bright idea. He took photographs of her messy bedroom and put them on an internet site so that the whole world could see them. The effect was dramatic. Claire was so ashamed that she tidied her bedroom. Her younger brother tidied his bedroom too. But Claire wanted revenge. She found some photographs of her Dad dancing round with a handbag at a party. She also photographed his garage, which was at least as messy as her bedroom had been. She put these photographs on the internet so that the world could see. In fact tens of thousands of people have visited the Williams family’s website. Some have posted photographs to shame someone in their own family. However, the number of visitors has been so great that the website hosting company now charge Mr Williams quite a lot to host his site. He is looking for advertisers and a sponsor. Assuming that his site is still active, you can view it from the link on the podcast website. The photograph of Claire’s bedroom that started it all has however disappeared. Vocabulary note : messy is a colloquial word which means untidy or dirty. A messy room means an untidy room. A messy child means a child who looks untidy and dirty and probably has half her breakfast down the front of her clothes.

I am in my local supermarket. I am here to do some shopping. You are here to practice the English names of fruit and vegetables. During the winter, there are only a few English grown vegetables in the shops. The main ones are potatoes, carrots, leeks, onions, parsnips and cabbage. But we can of course buy many other vegetables which have been imported from warmer countries around the Mediterranean. For example, we have tomatoes and courgettes from Spain, French beans from Egypt, sweetcorn from Italy and avocado pears from Tunisia. Most of our salad vegetables, such as lettuce, are also imported in winter. Over here in the fruit section there are English apples and pears, and several sorts of oranges from Spain, bananas from Latin America, grapes from South Africa and strawberries from Egypt. Many people in Britain are becoming more concerned about the way our food is produced. I am now in the section which sells organic fruit and vegetables. “Organic” means that the food is grown without artificial fertiliser or pesticide. Today there are many more organic foods in supermarkets than there were a few years ago. Here I can buy fresh organic apples, pears, bananas, onions, potatoes, beans, carrots, leeks and lettuce. Some of these are grown in this country, others are imported – often by air – from for example the USA, Egypt or Kenya. And we know that aircraft are an important source of carbon dioxide, which causes global warming. It is not always easy to be an environmentally conscious consumer! I have put together a website with pictures af all the fruit and vegetables mentioned in this podcast, and several more as well. You can use it to practice. Click on the link on the podcast website to go to it.

Colin Dixon is the manager of a secure depot where bank notes are stored for the Bank of England. On 21 February he was kidnapped by two men posing as police officers. His wife and eight year old son were also abducted. The kidnappers then forced Mr Dixon to return to the depot and to let one of the kidnappers in. At gunpoint, the robber then forced a member of the staff at the depot to open the gates. The rest of the gang and several vehicles entered the depot. It took the robbers nearly an hour to load money into a white Renault truck, which they then drove away. The police have said that the thieves stole £53 million. This was therefore the largest ever cash robbery in Britain. Since the robbery, the police have found several of the vehicles used by the gang, including the white Renault truck. They have also found £1.3 million in cash as well as guns and other equipment which they think the gang used. They have arrested several people and searched a farm not far from the depot. They have now charged three people in connection with the crime. The police say that they are confident that they can find the rest of the gang, and recover the rest of the money, but that it may take some time. There are lots of words connected with crime in this podcast. The verb TO STEAL (stole, stolen) means to take something which does not belong to you. If I steal something, then I am a THIEF (plural, THIEVES), and the crime I commit is called THEFT. For example, today’s story was about the theft of £53 million. To ROB someone means to take something from someone, normally by force. The gang in today’s story were thieves, but they were also ROBBERS. They didn’t just take £53 million, they used guns, threats and kidnapping to do so. The crime they committed is called ROBBERY. KIDNAP and ABDUCT mean about the same thing – to take someone away against their will and hold them, sometimes in order to collect a ransom. AT GUNPOINT means “with a gun pointing at you”. The police have ARRESTED several people. That means that these people are forced to remain at a police station while the police question them. Three people have now been CHARGED. That means that the police have formally accused them of a crime.

You have probably come across the English word “matter”. It is one of those difficult words that seem to mean different things in different contexts. An easy way to learn words like this is to memorise a few common expressions which contain them, and that is what we are going to do with the word “matter”. First, we have the expression “what is the matter?” If we see someone who is angry or upset, and we say to them “What is the matter?” we mean “What is wrong? What is the problem?” Second, if we say that something “matters”, we mean simply that it is important or serious. And now, if you are clear about these explanations, lets go and see how Kevin and Joanne are. The football season has begun. This means that on Saturday afternoons when United are playing at home, Kevin goes to the football ground to watch the match. On Saturdays when United are playing away, however, Kevin watches the match on TV. Today United have gone to London to play against Fulham, and Kevin is slumped on the sofa in front of the television, hoping that this week United will win. In the first half, things go well. United’s striker scores a brilliant goal after about 20 minutes. But in the second half, Fulham play much better. They score a lucky goal when one of the United defenders makes a mistake. And they score again in the last minute of the game. Kevin is not happy. “Oh no!” he shouts, and adds some words which I could not possibly repeat on a family podcast show like Listen to English. Joanne, who is doing some work on her computer in the kitchen, runs in. “What’s the matter?” she asks. “What has happened?” Kevin tells her that United have lost 2-1. “Is that all?” asks Joanne unsympathetically. “Never mind. Its only a football match. It doesn’t matter which side wins.” But Kevin has a different view. “Of course it matters”, he says. “United have lost their last three matches. If this goes on, they will be bottom of the table by Christmas.” At this moment, there is a loud crash in the kitchen. Joanne rushes back to see what has happened. She finds the cat sitting on the kitchen table. The cat has walked over the computer keyboard and added several lines of random letters to the end of the email which Joanne had been writing. The cat has then – somehow – managed to send the email to Joanne’s boss. Finally, she (the cat, that is) has knocked over a mug of coffee which Joanna had left on the table beside the computer. The coffee has gone all over the computer keyboard, and the mug is lying broken on the floor. “Oh no”, says Joanne. “What’s the matter?” asks Kevin. Joanne explains what has happened. “It doesn’t matter,” says Kevin. “We can dry the computer with a cloth”. “Of course it matters, you idiot,” says Joanne. “Liquids ruin computer keyboards. You can’t just dry them with a cloth. And what is my boss going to think about the email. She will think I am crazy!” Kevin and Joanne look at each other, and realise how ridiculous the situation is. They start laughing. “You’re right,” says Kevin. “It really doesn’t matter about the football.” “It doesn’t matter about the computer either,” says Joanne. “I know someone at work who can fix it. And my boss never reads her emails anyway.” The cat sits on the table and looks at them. “What is the matter with humans?” she thinks. “First they get upset. Then they start laughing like idiots. They don’t understand that food and sleep are the only things that really matter in life.”

Britain is an island. We are surrounded by sea. Nowdays, you can get here by plane, or by train through the Channel Tunnel. But before planes were invented, and the Channel Tunnel was built, the only way to come to Britain was by sea. The seas around Britain can be very dangerous. The Romans, who conquered England in 43 AD, knew this. They built lighthouses at Dover in England and Boulogne in France to guide ships across the Channel. However, the lighthouses fell into disuse after the Romans left at the beginning of the 5th century. For hundreds of years, the seas around Britain were completely dark at night. There was nothing to help sailors find their way, or to warn them of dangers. Among the most dangerous rocks around our coast are the Eddystone Rocks. They lie about 14 kilometers from the shore of south-west England, in other words at exactly the place where ships crossing the Atlantic reach England. Over the centuries, hundreds of ships have been wrecked on the Eddystone Rocks and thousands of sailors have lost their lives. Now let us meet a man called Henry Winstanley. He was born in 1644, and as a young man he became interested in architecture and engineering. Later he became a merchant, and bought five ships. Within a few years, two of the ships had been wrecked on the Eddystone Rocks. He asked the government why nothing was done to protect ships from the rocks. The government said that the rocks were far too dangerous and too far from land to build a lighthouse there. “Nonsense,” replied Henry Winstanley. “I will build a lighthouse there myself”. And he did. He started work in 1696. However, England and France were at war, and the following year a French ship arrived at the rocks and took Winstanley and his men back to France as prisoners. The French King, Louis XIV, ordered that they should be released immediately. “I am at war with England, not with humanity”, he said. In November 1698, the lighthouse was ready. It was built of stone and wood, and candles provided the light at the top of the lighthouse. During the first winter, it was damaged by a storm, but Winstanley repaired it and made it stronger. Winstanley’s lighthouse was the first lighthouse anywhere in the world to be built on a rock far out at sea. During the next five years, its little light sent its warning to passing ships, and not a single ship was wrecked on the Eddystone Rocks. In November 1703, however, a great storm struck southern England. It completely destroyed the lighthouse. Winstanley himself was in the lighthouse at the time, supervising some repairs, and he was killed. There is a lighthouse on the Eddystone Rocks today. It is the fourth lighthouse on the rocks, and it has kept sailors safe since 1882. Until 1982, a lighthouse keeper lived in the lighthouse to maintain and operate the light. It must have been the loneliest job in England. Today the lighthouse runs automatically. A maintenance crew visit occasionally by helicopter. It is very different from Winstanley’s wood and stone lighthouse, with candles to warn ships to keep away from Eddystone.

Today, we will visit a little village on the south coast of England. Its name is Tyneham, and it is a “ghost village”. What does ‘ghost village’ mean? It means that the village is deserted, there is no-one there. Many of the houses, the church and the school are still standing, but no-one lives in Tyneham any more. If you believe in ghosts, perhaps you feel that the ghosts of the people who used to live there still haunt the village. It is a “ghost village”. Tyneham is a very ancient place. People lived there in Roman times, and probably long before. For centuries, the people farmed the land and caught fish in the sea. In the 13th century, a stone church – St Mary’s church – was built, and in the middle of the 19th century the village got its own school. Tyneham lies in a very attractive part of England. Many of the other villages nearby have cafes, and souvenir shops and car-parks. They are crowded with visitors in the summer, and well-off people from London buy the pretty houses as weekend cottages. Why is Tyneham not like that? During the Second World War, shortly before Christmas 1943, the people in Tyneham all received letters from the government. The army needed the land in Tyneham as a place to train soldiers. All the inhabitants had to leave the village in less than a month’s time. Of course, this would only be temporary. When the War was over, the people could return home. But they never returned. After the War, the army decided that it still needed the land for training. They erected targets on the hillsides, and soldiers in tanks practised firing shells at them. Sometimes they missed the targets, and hit houses in Tyneham by mistake. The whole area around Tyneham was closed to the public. It was not safe to walk on the roads or the footpaths because of unexploded shells from the guns. The people of Tyneham complained and pressed the government to let them return home. Tourists complained that they could not visit this beautiful area of England. The army took no notice, and in the 1960s even demolished the ancient manor house in Tyneham. Eventually, in 1975, the army – with great reluctance – agreed that people could visit Tyneham and the area around it at weekends and during the month of August. So today, on days when the area is open, you can park your car at the car park at the top of the hill, and walk down to the old village. You can see the ruined houses, and visit a museum in the old church. You can walk down to the sea, to where the fishing boats used to be. You can see the village telephone box, which was erected only months before the villagers left – unfortunately, the telephone in it does not work! You can visit the old school. Inside, it is almost exactly as it was in the 1930s. The children’s books are still on the desks, and their names are on the pegs where they hung their coats. It is almost as if the children had just gone outside to play. A “ghost school”! I do not know how many of the 252 people who left Tyneham in 1943 are still alive – probably not many. It is now very unlikely that they will ever return home – indeed, probably they no longer think of Tyneham as home. So Tyneham will be left as a place where the army can shoot its guns, where the wildlife can flourish, safe from people and modern agriculture, and where tourists can come for a glimpse of what life in rural England used to be like. The last person to leave Tyneham left a note pinned to the door of the church. It read: Please treat the church and houses with care; we have given up our homes where many of us lived for generations to help win the war to keep men free. We shall return one day and thank you for treating the village kindly.

Like lots of people, I have Google as the home page on my web browser. On the Google page, there is a search box where I can type what I am looking for. For example, I can type “English lessons” if I want to find web sites which teach people English. Underneath the search box, there are two buttons. One says “Search”. If I click this button, I get a page of Google search results about “English lessons”. The other one says “I’m feeling lucky!” I have often looked at this button and wondered what it did, and whether I really had to feel lucky before I could click on it. So, today I decided to make a podcast about the word “lucky”, and to click on the “I’m feeling lucky!” button, just to see what happens. “Lucky” means “fortunate”. If I say, “I am lucky” it means that good things have happened to me. Maybe I have won the lottery. Maybe I have just met the most beautiful girl in the world. Maybe bad things have happened to other people, but not to me. I have escaped. I am lucky. So now I will click on the “I’m feeling lucky” button. What will happen? Will I win a lot of money? Will I enjoy good health and happiness and live to be 100? No, actually. The click takes me to a Google page about the Google logo. I am disappointed. I expected something much more exciting. I do not feel very lucky at all. Kevin does not feel lucky either. Last Saturday was the worst day of his life. Or, at least the worst day this football season. Last Saturday, Kevin’s team, United, lost 4-0 to their old rivals, Albion. “How can this happen?” says Kevin. Now, most people who were at the football match know why it happened. It happened because United played really badly. But Kevin cannot agree. “It was luck,” he says. “Albion were lucky. The referee did not see a foul against United’s striker. And United were unlucky that the referee disallowed their only goal.” If you are a football fan, you will know how Kevin feels. Your team never loses because they are bad. They lose because they are unlucky. But now let us meet someone who is really lucky. His name is Adam Potter, and he lives in Glasgow in Scotland. He is a keen mountaineer. A mountaineer is someone who climbs mountains as a hobby. Mountaineering can be great fun, but it can also be very dangerous, particularly in Scotland in winter. A week or so ago, Adam and some friends and his dog set off to climb a mountain near Ben Nevis, which is the highest mountain in Britain. As they climbed higher, snow and ice covered the ground. They stopped, and Adam suggested that they should take out their ice axes and put crampons on their boots, to stop them from slipping. And at that very moment, he slipped on the ice. He fell down the side of the mountain, over rocks and cliffs. He finally stopped falling and slipping and sliding 1000 feet (about 300 metres) down the mountain. Now, if you or I had fallen 300 metres down an icy Scottish mountain, we would probably be dead. In fact, more than 20 people are killed every year in falls on Scottish mountains. But Adam was lucky. He was unconscious for a minute or two when he stopped falling. Then he stood up and took a map out of his rucksack to work out where he was. He looked up to see the mountain rescue helicopter looking for him. The mountain recue team expected to find a dead body. The leader of the rescue team said, “He is a very, very lucky man.” Adam is in hospital, recovering from his injuries, but he does not intend to stay there for long. In 8 weeks time, he plans to travel to the area around Mount Everest, the world’s highest mountain, for a ten week expedition. Lets wish him lots of luck.

We have a saying in English “Manners maketh man”. “Maketh” is an old form of “make” or “makes”. So the expression means that, if you want to be a real man, you have to have good manners. “Manners” means the way that you behave to other people, particularly in public. If you have good manners you are polite and courteous. You remember to say “please” and “thank you”. You make people feel welcome and at ease. And if you have bad manners you are rude and discourteous. You say unpleasant things to people. You make them feel unwelcome and upset. If someone has good manners, we can say that they are “well mannered”; and if they have bad manners, we can say that they are “bad mannered” or “ill mannered”. Now let’s meet Heidi Withers. She is 28 years old and works as a personal assistant in a company in London. She is engaged to be married to her boy-friend, Freddie Bourne. Freddie runs a business that sells bicycles and parts for bicycles on the internet. Recently, Heidi and Freddie went to visit Freddie’s father and step-mother, who live in Devon in the south-west of England. Most people are nervous about their first meeting with their future father-in-law and mother-in-law. Most people would be polite and well mannered. They would try to create a good impression. Maybe Heidi tried to do these things. However, it did not work. Freddie’s step mother, Carolyn Bourne, thought that Heidi was rude and bad mannered. After the end of the visit, Carolyn thought that it was important to tell Heidi about her bad manners. She said to herself, “If I don’t tell her, she will never know.” So she sent Heidi an e-mail. “?It is high time someone explained to you about good manners,” she started, “because it is obvious that you don’t have any”. She went on to talk about some of the terrible things that Heidi did: Heidi stayed in bed too long. Heidi complained about the food. At meals, Heidi started eating before other people. Heidi made jokes about Freddie’s family. Heidi did not send Carolyn a card to thank her for her hospitality. Carolyn also had things to say about Heidi’s plans for her wedding. Heidi and Freddie plan to get married in a castle. Carolyn does not think that this is a good idea. ? She wrote, “No one gets married in a castle unless they own it. It is brash, celebrity style behaviour.” Carolyn thinks that, because Heidi’s parents do not have a lot of money, it would be better for Heidi and Freddie to have a smaller, less expensive wedding. What would you do if your future mother-in-law sent you an e-mail like this? Perhaps you would burst into tears. Perhaps you would send a reply to say how sorry you were about your behaviour and how very much you wanted to have a good relationship with your husband’s family. Heidi did not do this. Instead, she sent copies of the e-mail to her friends. And her friends sent the e-mail to their friends. And a few days later, the story was on lots of websites and in the newspapers, and we were all talking about it. Heidi’s father told the newspapers that Carolyn was haughty and arrogant. (Actually, he said some rather ruder things than that, but it would not be polite to repeat them on a respectable website like Listen to English). Freddie’s mother, and Heidi’s friends, and all sorts of other people, told the newspapers what they thought. Only Freddie, Heidi’s boyfriend, was sensible enough to keep quiet. What do you think? Who has the worse manners – Heidi or Carolyn? And will Carolyn be invited to the wedding, and will there be a fight if she goes? It is all very exciting!